


The Feloid

by Nomanono



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Androids, Cat Ears, Dystopia, Existentialism, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Science Fiction, running out of time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-25 19:04:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13219218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nomanono/pseuds/Nomanono
Summary: The city sprawled out from glinting skyscrapers, the glitz and glamor of the rich giving way to mazes of container-housing and government apartments. Trains wove through the low town, elevated above the streets, with their rhythmic racket echoing into hollow alleys. As long as he’d lived, Otabek Altin had fallen asleep to thatca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk, woken up to it, dreamed of it.





	The Feloid

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ellipsesarefun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellipsesarefun/gifts).



> Another of the Christmas Cats series - this one for ellipsesarefun for the Otayuri Gift Exchange. They asked for existentialism and contemplation of death, with maybe some post-apocalypse. This gears somewhat more dystopian than post-apocalyptic, but hopefully hits at least a few of your likes :) 
> 
> Thanks to Sintina and verity for their extreme patience and help editing this, and for all of their ideas that I either didn't take or failed to execute. There's always that gap between what you hoped to accomplish with a piece you wrote, and what you've actually written at the end of the day. I think, of all my works, the gap in this one might be the biggest, and I'm very grateful that they stuck with me through that dissonance (and my resultant whining).

The city sprawled outward from its center of glinting skyscrapers, the glitz and glamor of the rich giving way to mazes of container-housing and government apartments, edged not by natural mountains but the hazy heaps of scrap and garbage on the horizon. Trains wove through the low town, elevated above the streets, with their rhythmic racket echoing into hollow alleys. As long as he’d lived, Otabek Altin had fallen asleep to that _ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk_ , woken up to it, dreamed of it. 

When he was a child, his mother told him about the train out of the city, rails scouring north from Almaty towards the highlands, where the cities of movies were. The Siberian plains stretched in flourishing green swathes, covered in real live grass and paraded over by creatures of flesh and blood - not the prolific androids or robotic hybrids that roamed the rest of the world. There, the mountains were made of rock and stone and some even claimed, on clear days, that the sky was blue. 

Otabek had dreamed of it until he was fourteen, when his grandmother died without ever seeing anything beyond the labyrinth of Almaty’s low town. 

_Ca-thunk, ca-thunk, ca-thunk._

Otabek rode his bike beneath the elevated train, staring at the brief blips of light flashing through the rail slats. Potholes and popped rubber tires lined the street, but Otabek knew this path by heart; he could spare a split second to watch the train and wonder. 

A different glint caught his eye, a blue flash from a trash-filled alley. Normally he would have ignored it, but thinking about the train always had a way of softening him. 

Otabek looped back and killed his engine, kicking out his stand. His boot crunched on an empty foil bag as he dismounted. In the alley, a dust devil lifted papery scrap and plastic wrappers towards the sky. Otabek frowned, wondering if he’d been tricked by the light. 

As he turned to leave, he spotted an angelic humanoid head with a blue line of coolant arching over one eye, buried sideways to the nose in garbage. Two metallic ears rose from a mostly-bare skull, the hair barely enough to call fuzz. The eyes were closed, expression peaceful. Only its chest and an arm was visible above the debris. 

Otabek climbed up, lifting the robotic form out of the garbage. In its hand was the plastic rim of an outlet. It had probably been scavenging for power and not found it in time. 

Parts of its exoskin had been torn away, revealing bare metal underneath and fine wire mesh. It had metal caps on its knees and elbows, and a metal girdle at its hips that its lithe legs fit into like a doll. From the back stretched a long, prehensile tail, wide as a toilet paper tube, its tip unhinged to reveal the seeking male prongs of an electric plug. 

It was a mess, broken possibly beyond repair. 

It was exactly the challenge Otabek enjoyed. 

— 

“What’d you bring back this time?” Aya asked. Otabek’s sister was three years younger and many years wiser already; she had a knack for knowing when Otabek was up to something. He held the corners of a bundled tarp in his hands, bulk resting on his back. 

“Nothing,” Otabek said. The garage was no bigger than their bathroom: wide enough for Otabek’s sideways bike, a work bench, and whatever tools he could arrange on the wall. He shoved the muffler he’d been working on to the side and hefted the tarp onto the table. 

“Nothin’s pretty heavy,” Aya teased. 

“Maybe 20 kilos,” Otabek said. “It’s probably the exoskin. All that liquid.” He unwrapped the edges of the tarp and flicked on the light over the workshop. The creature’s skin looked even paler in the harsh spotlight. 

“A feloid!” Aya gasped. She shoved Otabek out of the way to look over it, investigating its tail and joints. Her fingers paused on a deep gouge, feeling the frayed wires. “It’s in real bad shape.”

“Yeah, and old, too, I think,” Otabek said. “Model number’s worn off.” He turned the feloid’s head, showing off the metal plate on the back of its neck, the steel brushed clean of any identifying marks. Aya pet the downy brown buzz on the feloid’s skull. In the wake of her touch, the hair looked blonde, clear of the grease now thick on Aya’s fingers. 

“Ugh, ew,” she said, staring at her hand. “Beka. _Ew_.” 

— 

_Ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk._

The train flashed in front of the tiny kitchen window in Otabek’s family apartment. Its vibrations rippled the meal-plan soup in their bowls. 

“Beks found a feloid today,” Aya declared to the assembled family. 

“Beka,” his mother sighed. Otabek shot a betrayed look at his sister. 

“It might be worth something if I fix it,” Otabek said. 

“A feloid? They’re outdated practically before they hit the shelves,” admonished Otabek’s brother, Temir. “You’d be better off selling under-the-bar scrap from the heaps.”

“I’m going to fix it,” Otabek changed his tactic. 

“It better stay in the garage,” his mother warned. 

“Promise,” Otabek said. “You won’t even know it’s there.” 

— 

A clanging crash and metallic howl woke Otabek in the middle of the night.

“What the—“ his brother groaned drowsily from the bed above him. Middle of the night disturbances were common in government apartments, probably nothing, but he’d never heard something like _that_ before. 

Otabek’s eyes flew open seconds after lying back down as he remembered the feloid in the garage. 

It was a brief trudge to the garage door, illuminated by blue-green power indicators on dozens of electronics. Otabek flicked on the light to find his bike toppled over and the feloid missing from his workbench. The bike shook, scratching noises echoing out from under it. 

The feloid was alive, pinned beneath the bike’s heavy engine and gas tank, pushing feebly to try and dislodge itself. Coolant leaked from the ragged wound in its exoskin, and its panicked eyes burned golden-green into Otabek’s memory.

“Help!” it yelped. Then its power fritzed out again and it went still. 

The voice sounded so human: hurt but not frightened, small but not weak. Most androids talked in an affected manner, emotion pre-processed into the raw vocal files they sourced for their speech, but not this one. Even with just a word, the difference was clear.

Otabek lifted his bike off the feloid and carried it back to the workbench. As he flipped off the light, all he could remember was the feloid’s eyes. 

They’d twinkled like it was alive.

— 

Work in Almaty’s low town, when it was available, meant unpaid drudgery used to justify meal packets. Otabek spent the next day sifting through machine-sorted scrap piles, finding anything the waste corporation deemed useful that couldn’t be easily scanned. He wore thick gloves and a mask with a nose plug, which didn’t stop him from smelling like refuse when he returned home. 

He never made it into the kitchen - Mama would yell at him later - and instead went directly to his work bench. Otabek had spent the day puzzling the the feloid’s spontaneous activation, and figured a puddle of coolant had connected the feloid’s fractured power circuit as it dripped from the wound. If that was all it took, there had to be a more permanent solution.

Part of working meal-hours at the heaps meant developing an eye for discarded valuables. Just in the day, Otabek had scrounged a half-used tube of exo and two coils of solder remnants. Soldering was an inelegant solution for a machine made of nano-fabricated parts, but living in low town meant making due. Otabek drew on his gloves and got to work.

He had to see those eyes again.

— 

_Ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk._

How many times had the train passed since Otabek started working? When he was younger he’d used the trains to tell time, playing in the intervals between them and making hashes as they passed. Time felt slower then, entire games and worlds come and gone between the dusty, rhythmic thuds. Now it felt like Otabek’s life was nothing but the trains, the moments in between washed away, forgotten, performed automatically after eighteen years of practice. 

Moment to moment, what was there, really, worth remembering? 

As the trains passed, Otabek patched the feloid’s skin with exo, took care of every coolant leak he could find, topped off the feloid with new coolant, and re-wired the power supply as best he could without having access to the core battery. It was a simple matter to depress the hard switch on the back of the feloid’s neck, but Otabek waited until the stillness between the trains to do so.

When the feloid’s eyes finally opened, Otabek forgot to breathe. 

The first thing the feloid did was take inventory: a panicked glance at the wound, messily repaired with exo, then a survey of the space, the bike, and finally Otabek. 

“You helped,” the feloid said. 

The voice tore Otabek from the thrall of the feloid’s eyes. “It was just a bike.” What a ludicrous thing to say.

The feloid’s eyes flicked to the vehicle, then up at Otabek again. “Something’s wrong with me.”

“Run diagnostics,” Otabek said. The feloid just blinked again. “Diagnostics,” Otabek repeated. He’d never met an AI that didn’t respond to the phrase. The feloid brought its arms around his torso, huddling in on itself.

“I’m cold.” 

— 

Otabek took the feloid into the apartment proper, avoiding the flickering light of the media center where Mama had fallen asleep, bypassing it to reach his and Temir’s bedroom. There was an extra blanket at the foot of Otabek’s bed that he slung around the feloid’s shoulders. 

“You helped,” the feloid repeated. 

There was a thunk and “OUCH” as the feloid’s voice made Otabek’s brother shoot awake.

“Beks, what — oh, god. A sexbot!?” 

“It is _not_ —“ 

“I am,” the feloid said, calm and curious.

In Otabek’s dumb staring silence, Temir burst out laughing.

“You picked up a _sexbot_ ,” Temir howled. “Should I leave you two alone?” He cackled while Otabek stewed. “Come on Beks, I know Jay wasn’t the prettiest, but a feloid?” 

Otabek glared as his brother. He was torn between letting out a choice expletive or threatening Temir against telling Mama when the feloid shattered his train of thought. Its fingers grazed Otabek’s wrist. The exoskin was warm, almost electric, against Otabek. It felt _real_.

“You’re upset,” the feloid said.

“You’re _upset_ , Beks,” Temir winked over the edge of the bunk. 

“I’m not — “ Otabek started, but something about the feloid’s eyes kept him from lying. “I’m _surprised_ is all.” Temir snorted and rolled over.

“Goodnight, you two,” he snickered. 

Otabek found himself flushing. “Let’s take you back to the garage.”

“It’s cold there.” 

“You’re a bot, you can’t feel —“ 

The feloid blinked up at him, green eyes searing. Otabek sighed, his spine curving with his exhale.

“Alright. I have an idea.” 

— 

Under the steaming water the feloid came to life, luxuriating in the shower’s heat, tail rotating in contented curls. Otabek soaped up his hands and scrubbed the feloid’s hair and skin, cringing at the brownish-red water that swirled down the drain. By the end of it, the feloid almost looked presentable. Otabek would have to get polish for the metal. 

“Are you… really a sexbot?” Otabek asked as he shut off the water. The feloid’s ears drooped as the heat faded. 

“Yes,” it said. “I said so.” Those golden-green eyes scanned Otabek’s. He swore the feloid was amused with him.

“You’re just… small and…” Otabek looked down at the seamless metal plate curving around the feloid’s groin. He didn’t know why he felt compelled to justify himself to the bot.

“My factory seal ensures I’m not tampered with before my owner decides to utilize my features,” the feloid said. 

“Owner,” Otabek echoed.

“Yes.”

“Am I your owner?” Otabek asked, and even before it was out of his mouth he hated himself for asking. Heat rushed to Otabek’s cheeks.

“No,” the feloid said. It tilted its head to the side and was about to speak when the train came by. 

_Ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk._

“What’s that?” the bot asked, looking up into the suddenly dust-thick air. 

“Just the train,” Otabek said. He pushed away the thought of grassy plains. “It happens all the time.” 

He could _feel_ the feloid looking at him. Attention had a weight to it, a metaphysical magnetism that drew on Otabek’s own. 

“You’re upset,” the feloid said. 

“Not anymore,” Otabek assured. 

“No… deeper than that.” 

It was Otabek’s turn to blink.

“The train makes you want something.” 

— 

“So much for keeping him in the garage,” Temir mused the next morning. The deactivated feloid was curled up in their bedroom chair, surrounded by thick blankets. 

“He was cold,” was Otabek’s only reply. 

“Wait - _he_?” his brother smirked, wagging imploring eyebrows in Otabek’s direction. Otabek’s face reddened. He tugged on his boots, shouldered his jacket, and left for the heaps. 

The day passed in an unfocused blur, gloved hands pulling barely-useful scrap from loose piles and production lines. All Otabek could think about was the feloid’s words. How could he know? How could he _possibly_ know? No AI could read someone’s biodata like that, could find _meaning_ like that. Sure, there were stories about people assuming a chatbot was a real person, or confusing the higher-tier androids for living breathing humans. But to have something Otabek _knew_ was an android read him so deeply, and accurately, in a single glance?

Otabek rode home underneath the elevated tracks, chasing the train for blocks at a time before it inevitably left him behind.

— 

“Do you need food?” Otabek asked as he pushed the button on the back of the feloid’s neck. He still hadn’t been able to access the feline’s battery compartment, and now he had several stripped screws to prove it. The feloid woke with less of a start than yesterday, but still took inquisitive scans of Otabek’s face, Otabek’s bedroom.

“My mouth isn’t for ingesting substances. I have a small stomach pouch that I can regurgitate after and rinse by drinking fluids, but it’s purely for facilitating my intended functionality.” As if to illustrate, the feloid opened its mouth. It looked human enough: teeth and gums and tongue, but Otabek couldn’t focus on anything past that for his blush.

“Why didn’t your owner want that?” Otabek asked. “You were bought, weren’t you?” 

A fraction of a second passed before the feloid responded: “I remember an impact. I woke up inside a broken package and wounded myself trying to get out of it. I was alone, outside of Almaty. My packaging must have fallen from a great height.” 

_Ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk._

“I remember a train,” the feloid said.

“You never had an owner, then.” 

“No,” the feloid responded. It went to Otabek’s bed, sitting on the edge and pulling the blanket back around its shoulders. “I decided I owned myself.” 

That shouldn’t have been possible, either. All AI had bounds, and self-awareness was one of them, but Otabek was adapting to the feloid’s constant surprises. He crossed his arms as he considered the creature.

“I won’t hurt you,” the feloid said, like it sensed Otabek’s wariness. “I’m not designed to hurt, anyway.” 

“How long have you… owned yourself?” Otabek asked. 

“I woke up at 13:15 on March 1st.” The feloid paused. “I lost power after forty-three thousand two hundred sixty two trains went by.” A few months. And then who knows how long it had been buried - until yesterday.

“Hardly any time at all,” Otabek said. 

“My entire life.” 

Silence spread out once more. Otabek sat beside the feloid on the bed. “I was going to sell you.”

“You’re too curious to give me away,” the feloid said, and Otabek swore he saw the feloid’s lips twitch up in a smile. 

“Mama needs the money for her knee,” Otabek countered. 

“I don’t belong to you.” The feloid twisted to face Otabek. Otabek’s hand came to the feloid’s hair, like he was compelled, and brushed over the pale blond fuzz. The feloid made a noise like a sigh. 

“What will you do, then, now that you’re healed?” 

“I’m staying here,” the feloid said. He pushed his cheek against Otabek’s palm, then lied down on Otabek’s bed. “You helped me.”

— 

Otabek woke up in the middle of the night to his brother’s soft snickering. He looked at Temir like he was crazy, only to realize he had an idling feloid in his arms. Otabek glared over the fuzzy blond head at Temir until he climbed to the upper bunk to sleep. The feloid’s feet and fingertips kicked and pawed in tiny, near-invisible motions, eyes peacefully closed. It was probably a debugging routine so the joints wouldn’t stick, but it looked like dreaming.

Otabek hooked his chin over the feloid’s shoulder and closed his eyes. 

— 

“Your sexbot needs a name,” Temir said the next morning. 

“I’m called Yuri,” the feloid said as he rose, stretching his arms above his head. 

“You didn’t turn it off!?” Temir balked. “What if it up and left in the middle of the night!?”

“He’s not going anywhere,” Otabek said. “And he decides when to turn himself off.”

Yuri nodded in agreement, then leaned on Otabek and pushed the button on the back of his neck. Otabek caught the suddenly stiff bundle as it deactivated, surprised Yuri had trusted him like that.

“He better not eat my meals,” Temir said, still wary.

The only meals Yuri ate were synthetic ones, swallowing invisible tea with Aya when she reenacted her histories, or wrapping his mouth lewdly around the cardboard of a toilet paper tube to make Temir blush. They still kept Yuri hidden from Mama, and perhaps because of that secrecy it took Otabek nearly a week to learn that Yuri was not, in fact, bound to the house by choice, but necessity.

“Of course it’s illegal,” Temir said. “I scanned him last night. He’s got himself on complete lockdown: no transmitting signals, no open ports, he’s not even connected to our personal network.”

“Maybe his receiver’s broken.”

“No,” Temir said. “He doesn’t want to be found. Whatever OS he’s on, whatever lets him be… _that_ ,” Temir made a gesture of indescribability towards the deactivated feloid. “It’s an affective protocol. Emotional processing.” 

“What?”

“He can feel. He has feelings. He’s _alive_ , or as close as you can get anyway. That’s what makes him so —“ another fruitless gesture “ _you know_.” 

“Those were outlawed a century ago, he can’t possibly be that old, and the government’s terminated every-“ Otabek stopped as he realized what he was saying.

“Yeah,” Temir grunted. “And they’ll terminate him, too, if they find out about him.” 

— 

Yuri didn’t deny it, but he did crawl into Otabek’s lap. He claimed it was for the heat, soaking in the warmth of Otabek’s chest and tucking his head under Otabek’s chin. That didn’t explain the rhythmic brush of Yuri’s fingers on his forearm, or the way Yuri’s fingers crept to his hand and laced together.

“Otabek,” Yuri said. “Tell me why the trains make you sad.” 

— 

Otabek started with Grandma, then Siberia, then the earth’s heat and the S curve graphs, the extinction and migration and the masses - like him - caught in between. Each day when he came back from the heaps Yuri was waiting, tail twitching, eyes bright, ready to crawl into Otabek’s lap. The stories fell off Otabek’s lips like prayers. Their first kiss was a furtive thing, a surprise before Yuri deactivated himself in embarrassment. By the end of the second week Temir stopped saying anything about the two sharing a bed, twined around each other, and he didn’t even snicker the day he woke up to find Yuri’s seal broken.

Otabek didn’t go to the heaps at all that day. 

_Ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk._

“What feeling is your favorite?” Otabek asked as the motes thickened around them. Yuri lifted a hand from beneath the covers and pushed it through the dust-dense air, green eyes accented by a thoughtful smirk. 

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Yuri asked, but the question was earnest. His eyes flickered with a thousand forbidden processes approximating life. 

“Of all the feelings in all the world?” Otabek mused. “Maybe you just haven’t had time to feel enough of them.”

Yuri shrugged, resting his palm on Otabek’s chest. “It wouldn’t change my answer.”

— 

_Ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk._

The rhythm of the train sounded like Yuri’s heartbeat, if the feloid had a heart. Otabek heard it again and again like a dream as he lied in bed with Yuri curled against him. It was only with idly wandering fingers that he discovered the feloid’s power compartment had unlocked with the broken seal. The feloid kissed at Otabek’s neck and chest as Otabek sat up. Yuri’s hand curled around the groove of Otabek’s hip.

“Let me see your back,” Otabek said, pushing down the blanket. “Your panel…” 

Yuri sat up, turning away from Otabek, watching him over his shoulder. Otabek swiped at the access compartment, hidden between the dimples on Yuri’s lower back. The panel lifted, and inside the diagnostics panel was blinking red. Otabek frowned as he read the flashing warning.

“What’s wrong?” Yuri asked, fingertips drifting over Otabek’s hip. 

“Your backup battery,” Otabek said. “It only has twenty days left.”

— 

Something crawled around inside Otabek’s chest as he hooked up his scanner, running it over Yuri’s scalp. The backup battery was smaller than a baby’s pinky nail, resting in the center of the massive processor that comprised Yuri’s brain. In theory, they could replace it if they found the access port. The scanner beeped and ticked, generating a fuzzy black and white image of Yuri’s brain above the work bench. As Otabek dragged the scanner around, the feeling in his chest worsened, squeezing his lungs.

“How…” Otabek whispered. He shook his head unconsciously, fussed with the scanner. “This shouldn’t…” His breath went shallow, like there wasn’t enough air. “No, no…” He repeated his route over every angle, again and again, until Yuri finally grabbed his wrist. 

“Otabek.” 

Whatever impact had activated Yuri, it had damaged that internal nexus. Battery fluid had leaked out and solidified in the surrounding chips. It was completely inaccessible without destroying them. 

“I can find a way,” Otabek insisted, voice hitching. “There must—“ 

Yuri slid shaking fingers between Otabek’s. His palm felt warmer than usual, all the coolant in Yuri’s wiring unable to calm the feverish whirr of his processors. “You’d kill me.”

Time hung between them, suspended by their suffocating realization. In a single instant, the tree of their potential futures was sheared to nearly nothing, branches of dreams and possibilities fading into dust from the train. 

“Twenty days,” Otabek whispered.

_Ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk._

— 

Before, the trains had felt infinite, endless, and constant. Always there was another, sure as the sun. Now they tolled away Yuri’s life, each one marking precious minutes: ticking, unstoppable, fatal. 

An hour later, Yuri and Otabek walked hand in hand to Otabek’s room, where Yuri curled in a nook beneath the stairs. Otabek set out a pillow and blankets, tucking Yuri in as if he were simply going to sleep. 

“I’ll see you soon,” Yuri promised, wiping the wet off Otabek’s cheeks. 

“Soon,” Otabek echoed. He brushed his lips against Yuri’s, then deepened the affection, suddenly desperate, pressing. He ignored the motion of Yuri reaching to the back of his neck, and kissed until Yuri’s lips went slack against his own. 

The air left Otabek’s lungs. He stayed frozen until the next train, staring at lifeless metal and exoskin in the shape of his feloid. The dust collected on its cheeks, darkening splattered teardrops.

— 

It was March 1st. 

Otabek knelt before the alcove and reached behind the inactive feloid’s neck. He depressed the metal button and Yuri’s eyes popped open, immediately scanning for Otabek. 

“Happy birthday,” Otabek murmured, catching Yuri as he leapt into his arms. Otabek tried not to cry, swore he wouldn’t, but he’d spent half the year waiting for this one day, and its brevity already loomed, inconceivably short. 

Yuri had twenty days, but they could spread those hours across years - across Otabek’s entire life. That’s what Yuri had asked, in the quiet moments between the trains. A few hours, every year. ‘ _We could grow old together_.’ 

“You kept me warm,” Yuri realized, looking back at the alcove and its piled blankets as he sank into Otabek’s body heat. 

“I helped,” Otabek whispered. He held up a thumb drive. “And I wrote you letters.”

— 

The first days had been the hardest. It was one thing to know the feloid was deactivated, and a completely different thing to return from the heaps, expecting subconsciously the twitching tail and bright smirk and finding only emptiness and cool metal. How many times had Temir found Otabek sitting beside the alcove, hand resting on the blonde fuzz of Yuri’s hair, telling stories to a hollow shell? How many times had Aya caught him staring at the train through their tiny kitchen window, only to whisper: “I miss him too.” 

_It feels like you’re dead_ , Otabek typed the first time. He wasn’t even sure it would work, if the feloid would be able to process the raw bit data when he awoke. It was a hundred conversations they didn’t have time for, whispered from beyond their little windows of life. _I know I could push that button and you’d be alive in an instant, but now, even centimeters away, you feel farther than Siberia_.

— 

October 31st 

Aya led Yuri from his alcove, and it was worth it to see Otabek’s face illuminate with a smile far brighter than the twenty one candles. 

“I wanted him to see your birthday,” Aya said.

Otabek crossed the space, swirled Yuri in his arms. Temir put on music from before the heat, and Otabek held Yuri to his chest and swayed. At the end of the evening, Otabek brought Yuri back to the alcove. He tucked him into the blankets and pet the soft fuzz of his hair. 

“Do you take care of me?” Yuri asked. “When I’m inactive?”

“I dust you every week, and I kiss you every morning.”

“Three hundred sixty five kisses,” Yuri said. “And I’m only awake for one.” 

Tears rose unbidden to Otabek’s eyes, blurring Yuri’s face. He found his lips against Yuri’s, kissing apologies and possibilities and every missed moment he so desperately wanted to share. He was still kissing when Yuri grabbed his hand, brought it to the back of his neck, and together they pushed the button.

— 

It was only in the morning that Otabek thought to check the thumb drive, still plugged into the small of Yuri’s back. 

_Happy Birthday, Otabek_ , the first of Yuri’s letters began: one for every note Otabek had left him. Some were short, some were long. Some were flagged with sarcasm indicators and teasing. Others were open, and earnest: _How can I be dead_ , Yuri wrote, _if androids are never alive to begin_.

Otabek read the letters slowly, pacing himself day by day. _It’s almost like you’re here_ , Otabek wrote in return. _I can hear your voice, even though you’re gone. I can feel your life, even if your body is dead_. 

Days became weeks became months all over again. Time passed in trains and dust and Otabek rode beneath the slats. 

_Ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk._

In the evening Otabek sat beside the feloid, rubbing balm into the soreness of his back or the sprain in his shoulder. Yuri’s smirk and twitching tail and enamored heat weren’t there, but Yuri’s words were. 

Yuri’s life was. 

— 

“The letters…” Otabek said when he woke Yuri for his third birthday. Yuri crawled into Otabek’s lap, his kisses passionate and filled with the compacted emotion of all the time passed, all the letters read and written. When they’d slaked their desire, Otabek held up the thumb drive again. 

“Another year of letters?” Yuri asked, his exoskin smooth and warm as his fingers traced down Otabek’s arm. 

“Another year of life.” 

Yuri’s expressions fluttered as Otabek plugged the drive into his back. They curled on the couch together and looked through pictures from the year: Temir’s graduation, Aya and a laughing boy, a Siberian postcard Otabek found in the heaps, the green of the grass bright as an LED. 

When Otabek wrote, sometimes the details were unimportant, superfluous, but Otabek never deleted them. What was superfluous, anyway? The moments between the trains? The months between those eyes? 

Perhaps these photos were the highlights, or perhaps they were the outliers, and it was the superfluous things, the routine and the day to day, that described who Otabek really was. 

— 

Aya got married and moved out of the apartment. Mama set up a cot in the living room so Temir and Otabek could have their own rooms, but only Temir used it to start dating. 

On Yuri’s birthday his eyes scanned rapidly back and forth as he processed all of Otabek’s letters. His face twitched in micro-expression of joy and sorrow, amusement and empathic frustration. They talked about the highlights while Otabek pet Yuri’s hair. Yuri asked questions and watched Otabek’s eyes as he described them.

“We should turn you off,” Otabek murmured at the end of the evening. The bed was warm and perfect and Yuri’s metallic tail was wrapped around Otabek’s leg. 

“I want to be with you, like this,” Yuri whispered. He touched the corners of Otabek’s eyes. “In a few days for me, you’ll have wrinkles and silver hair.” Yuri tried to smile, but it couldn’t reach his eyes. “If the time between trains goes so quickly now, won’t it go faster then?” 

Otabek sat up, gazing into Yuri’s green, and the feloid continued. 

“…maybe an hour now is longer than an hour then.”

— 

Time felt simultaneously liquid and immutable. Otabek watched days and then years blur together as if he was somehow apart, a stone in the river. He thought in terms of twenty days, of blocks of five hours strung across eighty years. Five hours this year. Five hours next year. Five hours, and in between, like the trains, were letters. 

_Ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk._

_Everything is the same,_ Otabek wrote, dirty with train dust, aching from the heaps. _But I am older._

— 

Yuri’s tenth birthday started with a digestion of data, then happy smiles as Aya placed her baby in his arms. Even Mama was used to the feloid now, fed Yuri a piece of cake scrounged from their meal-packets because she still didn’t realize what he was. He ate it without complaint. 

“Otabek,” Yuri said at the end, when they returned to their room and sat on the edge of the bottom bunk. 

“Hmm?” 

“Aya has a baby. Temir is married. But you…” 

Otabek stared at the feloid, like daring him to say it. The resolve in Otabek’s features felt like a sun.

Yuri’s voice wavered as he continued. It was layered with emotion, just like that very first time Otabek heard it. “I can’t smile when you come home every day,” Yuri said. “I can’t listen to your stories when they happen. I can’t help you cook or create a family for you. I can’t give you any legacy beyond this single life.” 

Otabek closed his eyes. “I left that part out of the letters.” 

“… You have someone?” 

“No,” Otabek said. “All the times Mama and Temir told me to get one.” 

“You can find someone else but still remember me. I don’t want you to be alone.” 

“I’m not,” Otabek said. He set his hand on the back of Yuri’s neck, moved his fingers to the button, but the feloid grabbed his wrist.

“Please,” Yuri whispered. “I can watch you get old. I can’t watch you grow alone.”

Otabek chuckled, the last thing Yuri expected. “Every morning I kiss you, and every train I think of you. Every week I write to you and every night I dream of you. You’re with me in all the ways I need.” 

“But —“ 

Otabek kissed him. “For me, that’s enough.” 

— 

Mama died. Temir had a son. Aya’s family grew and flourished. 

Otabek sat in the kitchen, eating meal-plan soup, ignoring the aches from the heaps that grew and spread through his bones. The kitchen window reflected a silver-haired man who’d lived his whole life in Almaty’s low town, staring at trains, imagining the green of other worlds. When he went to his bed he paused to touch the soft hair of a feloid, its metal carefully polished, its joints oiled and dustless, its care unmistakeable. 

— 

For Yuri, it had been just twenty days. 

Aya held his hand as they walked into the sterile white room. Her family stood around a crisp-sheeted bed, an old man half-asleep atop it. 

“Otabek,” Yuri gasped. 

Otabek’s eyes drifted open, and when they met Yuri’s they squinted into a smile. “Yura…” he managed, and his fingers twitched in a sorry beckon. The feloid climbed onto the bed, curling against a body that was so much thinner than last time. 

“I thought… I’d make it to your birthday…” Otabek murmured. “I meant to tell you…” 

He gestured faintly to the bedside. Aya grabbed the drive there and held it out to Yuri. His eyes shivered as he scanned the letters, and a hand clasped at his sternum for the pain of them.

“You should have woken me,” Yuri frowned. Otabek didn’t have the strength to shake his head. He tucked Yuri up against his side, felt the familiar tingle of skin against exo. 

“Your wrinkles keep getting deeper,” Yuri whispered. 

“You look the same as the day I found you,” Otabek countered. For all the letters Otabek had written, all the kisses he’d left, words fell away with the minutes. Doctors came and went, shaking heads, and Otabek kept Yuri warm. 

“How long between the trains now?” Yuri asked. 

“Just one more train, Yuri,” Otabek rasped. The red light of Yuri’s panel flared in a final desperate warning that Otabek covered with his fingertips. His eyes fell closed, breathing so shallow it could no longer lift Yuri’s palm on his chest. “Can you hear it coming?” 

Even in the hospital silence, the echo burned in Yuri’s brain. The energy inside him fractured, spiked, reactivating in an instant all the data of his life. 

_Ca-thunk ca-thunk ca-thunk._

This train would finally take them out of low town, far from Almaty, away from the heaps and into a land above, filled with rolling earthy hills and grass the green of Yuri’s eyes.


End file.
